That was hard work. It took the strength right out of her to feel that these material things, which had belonged to them and been, as it were, a part of them, were useless now. They would never need them anymore.

Of course most of her mother’s things had long ago been disposed of, but there were her father’s clothes and the special things that had belonged to his invalidism. It was hard to put them away forever. Yet Jennie demanded that they be sent to a hospital.

“That bed table and the electric fan and the little electric heater and the hot water heater. They give me the creeps to look at them. It isn’t good to have such reminders around, Marion. You want to get away from everything that belonged to the sickroom. I for one want to forget sickness and death for a while and have a little good time living.”

Marion felt that Jennie was a bit heartless in the way she talked about it, but she realized that it would be better to put the things where they would be doing someone some good, so she packed them tenderly away and sent them to a poor, little, new hospital in which her church was interested, and sighed as she took down the soft curtains from the invalid’s windows and washed the windows and set them wide, realizing that the sunshine would not hurt tired eyes in that room anymore and could be let in freely without hindrance.

“Would you mind if Tom and I were to take Father’s room now?” asked Jennie the next day. “Then Bobby and the baby could have the room you’ve been occupying, and you can go back to the room you used to have before we came. It would change things around a little and not seem so gloomy in the house, don’t you think?”

The house didn’t seem gloomy to Marion the way it was, and she felt it rather sudden to tear up her father’s room and give it to another use, but of course it was sensible and better in every way for the children to be next to their father and mother. So she said she didn’t mind, and they set to work moving furniture and changing things from one closet to another.

And after all, Marion rather enjoyed getting back to her old sunny room at the back of the house, with the bay window her father had built for her, her own little bookcase full of books, and her own pretty furniture her father and she had picked out years before. It brought sweet and tender memories and made her feel that life was a little more tolerable now. She could retire to her own pleasant room and try to feel like her little-girl self again, lonely and sad, of course, but still at home in the room that her father had made for her just after her mother had died—the sunniest, prettiest room in the house, she felt. It was a wonder that Jennie didn’t like it. Still, of course, she wanted to have the children nearer, and where they had been sleeping in the guest room was too far away for comfort. Now Nannie could come down from the small, third-story room and take the room her brothers had been occupying. It was better all around. But yet, she felt a lingering wistfulness about that front room where the invalid had lain so long. It was hard to feel its door shut and to know it did not belong to her anymore. It seemed as if Jennie was so anxious to wipe out all memory of her father.

But Jennie gave Marion very little time to meditate over these things. She seemed restlessly eager to keep something going all the time. At breakfast one morning she said to Marion, “Marion, I don’t see why you don’t get out and see your friends now. There’s nothing to hinder. Have a little company in and make the place lively. It will do you good. It’s been so gloomy all the time Father was sick. Let’s have some life now. Don’t you want to ask some friends in to dinner or lunch or something?”

Marion roused from her sad thoughts to smile.

“Why, I guess not, Jennie. I don’t know who I’d ask, I’m sure.